TimeGhost History
Published 20 Apr 2025This episode, we see the Chinese Civil War turn decisively against Chiang Kai-Shek. Mao’s Communists score great victories on the battlefield while the Nationalists face economic collapse. How much longer can Chiang hold on?
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April 21, 2025
The Battles That Broke the Chinese Nationalists – W2W 22 – 1948 Q2
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Bonus QotD: Pierre Poilievre
… Canada’s governing class is not popular. For years now, all across the country Canadians have defiantly hoisted the black flag of Fuck Trudeau as precursor to their intent to start slitting political throats the next time they’re allowed to vote. Such vulgarity is unheard of in Canadian politics. It takes a great deal for Canadians to be impolite.
However, this widespread dissatisfaction has so far failed to coalesce into any meaningful populist insurgency opposing the Laurentian elite. Until recently, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, was coasting towards an easy electoral landslide on the back of this simmering popular anger, with his primary and indeed only selling point being that he is not Justin Trudeau. That is not to say that he is terribly different from Justin Trudeau. For American readers, Poilievre can be best described as vaguely reminiscent of Pete Buttigieg, with politics a hair to the right of the left of the right of Buttigieg’s left.
On a policy level the Conservatives are practically identical to the liberals; indeed, on immigration, after the LPC was forced by overwhelming weight of public opinion to slightly reduce the rate at which they lavished student visas and temporary foreign worker visas on their clients, Poilievre’s Conservatives essentially allowed the Liberals to outflank them to the right on the immigration issue, despite mass deportations being a very clear electoral winner.
Only very recently did Poilievre finally pledge to reduce immigration to “only” a quarter of a million a year … still a far cry from the clear necessity to reverse the flood that Trudeau and the rest of his World Economic Forum Young Global Leader alumni unleashed on the country.
John Carter, “Maple Maidan”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2025-02-15.
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ZB47: A Truly Weird Czech SMG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Dec 2024The ZB47 was developed at Brno as a contender for Czech military submachine gun adoption in the late 1940s. The Czech Army had technically adopted a submachine gun prior to World War Two (the vz.38; video on that is coming a bit later) but production did not begin before the arrival of German troops. After the war, the army was eager to add a submachine gun to its arsenal, and the vz.38 was no longer a practical option as it was chambered for the 9x17mm cartridge.
The ZB-47 is chambered for 9x19mm Parabellum, fired from an open bolt, uses a simple blowback action, and does not have a semiautomatic setting — just full auto. In its infantry configuration, it has a fixed wooden stock with a thumbhole design and a 72-round (!) magazine fitted almost horizontally under the stock and barrel. A unique feed system pushes cartridges vertically up out of the magazine feed lips into a pair of feed ramps that pitch the round 90 degrees forward and into the chamber. The system is closest to that of the FN P90, although the cartridge rotating element on the ZB is built into the gun, not the magazine. The paratrooper variant of the gun has a collapsing metal stock, which shortened the overall length and also restricts its capacity to a 30-round magazine when the stock is closed. Rate of fire was reportedly a blistering 1200 rpm.
One challenge of this very long straight magazine was the slight taper of the standard 9x19mm cartridge case. In 30-round magazines this is not really an issue, but by 72 rounds the taper adds up to enough to cause problems stacking cartridges. Brno attempted to solve this by making a truly cylindrical version of 9×19, but the Czech military was (rightly) not convinced of its benefits and rejected it.
In the 1947 field trials, eight Czech units were given examples of the ZB47 and other competitors. Five of those units actually reported favorably on the ZB; it looks like a very awkward gun to handle but actually isn’t in practice. However, the Army deemed it to have too many drawbacks, including the magazine reliability, poor accuracy, and bring judged too fragile. One more set of trials would take place the next year and ultimately the CZ model 23 was adopted. In total, just 62 examples of the ZB-47 were produced.
Many thanks to the VHU — the Czech Military History Institute – for giving me access to these two fantastic prototypes to film for you. The Army Museum Žižkov is a part of the Institute, and they have a three-story museum full of cool exhibits open to the public in Prague. If you have a chance to visit, it’s definitely worth the time! You can find all of their details (including their aviation and armor museums) here:
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QotD: Thomas Hobbes’ view of the “state of nature” in Leviathan
The idea of “natural rights” was nothing new, of course. It goes back to at least Aristotle; Thomism and the whole medieval Scholastic schmear is incomprehensible without it. But Aristotle lived in a pre-Christian world, and Aquinas in a monolithically Catholic one. Both would find the idea of two sets of believers going to the hilt at each other over different versions of the same god incomprehensible. But that was the reality in Hobbes’s day, and it was real enough to reduce parts of Germany to cannibalism — the best modern estimates put casualties from the Thirty Years’ War at World War I levels proportional to population. That simply couldn’t go on, especially with the infidel Turk hammering at the gates.
Thus Hobbes decided to write God out of the picture. There’s lots of debate over Hobbes’s personal religious beliefs, if any; ranging from “he was a sincere, if somewhat unorthodox, Anglican” to “he was a raging atheist”. It doesn’t matter for our purposes. All we need to know is: because appeal to Scripture couldn’t end in anything but more bloodshed, perforce political legitimacy must be secularized, and the old concept of “natural rights” seemed to be the answer. Do we have rights just by virtue of being human, and if so, what are they?
Thus the “state of nature”. Hobbes was always quite clear that this was a thought experiment, not a statement about historical anthropology. His employer, the Cavendish family, the Earls (later Dukes) of Devonshire, were investors in the Virginia Company, and we believe Hobbes acted on their behalf in some capacity with the Company. So he knew better than anyone that the North American Indians weren’t in the state of nature (as he semi-jokingly suggested in Leviathan). Only semi-jokingly, though, because […] it was a real question back in the 1500s just what authority, if any, the conquistadores had to overthrow the native regimes in New Spain. Cortes and the boys might’ve laughed when the Requirimiento was read out, but they nonetheless felt compelled to do it, to legally cover their monarchs’ asses.
From the perspective of post-Hobbes political philosophy, it’s an easy answer. Montezuma was legitimately ruler of the Aztecs, as they, the Aztecs, had gotten out of the state of nature the way everyone else does: Via the “social contract” (recall that Hobbes himself doesn’t use this term). But since international relations remain in the state of nature, by definition, that’s all the justification the Spaniards would’ve needed. That Fernando and Isabella would’ve cheerfully burnt Hobbes at the stake is ironic, Alanis-level at least, but they were practical people; they’d be happy to use his arguments
Severian, “Range Finding III: Natural Law”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-23.
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